In case you missed it yesterday, Tencent and Activision announced they are putting out a new Call of Duty game for mobile. While details are pretty scant, they did put out a trailer (see above) and have a page where you can pre-register for the game, which might give you in-game rewards when the game actually launches.

Based on what's shown in the trailer, it looks to be a no-nonsense attempt to shoehorn every facet of mainline CoD games into a mobile package, which could be good. Though personally, I have my doubts. There are already precious few first-person shooters on mobile that are any good at all. Many of the best ones, like Call of Duty: Strike Force, have disappeared off the App Store completely. Meanwhile, things like Modern Combat 5 persist, which is a prime example of how to faithfully recreate the feeling of a big budget shooter on mobile while also leaning heavily into every worst tendency of free-to-play mobile design.

As a role playing game (RPG), Pixelot is a slow burn. It starts with a cliché exposition and a very conventional design wrapped up in pretty simplistic presentation. Just as you think it’ll be some really half-assed game you can beat in a couple hours though, the game explodes with possibilities. If you have a little patience, Pixelot is a fantastic and original mobile RPG that you should totally play.

Weather Farmer is an idle game that changes with the weather… literally. Using weather information from Dark Sky, players generate varying amounts of energy based on how they’ve deployed weather cubes they’ve purchased. This idea is definitely a gimmick, but there’s enough other stuff to like about Weather Farmer’s design that you can have fun with it whether you care about the weather or not.

When REKT! first came out, I was impressed with the game’s ability to channel the gameplay of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in a small, streamlined package. Be that as it may, I was also pretty underwhelmed with the game’s lack of content.

Fast-forward a year and a half and REKT! now has quite a bit more stuff in it. Given that the game is now more fleshed-out than ever, I went ahead and dove back into REKT! to see if it feels like more than the proof of concept it felt like at launch.

The App Store is bursting at the seams with all kinds of apps and games of varying quality, but one of the most consistent issues with it is discoverability. Despite having what seems like unlimited money and a full App Store editorial team, Apple is astonishingly bad at celebrating games that aren’t already hugely successful.

Game preservation is a problem. When games go out of production, hardware decays, titles get removed from digital storefronts, etc. there’s not a lot of recourse for players to return to titles they once loved. This is a particularly big issue for mobile games, since Apple has provenon multiple occasions that they do not care about games on their store, much less old ones.

Thankfully, there’s some folks out there who recognize this and have have decided to do something about it. GameClub is a new developer that just announced last week their dedication to “bringing awesome premium games back to mobile.” Although they’re only in their early access phase, they’ve already proven they’re up for task. Here’s what you need to know about GameClub, including instructions on how to get into their early access program.

Runners have origins that trace back to the 80s, but their popularity exploded in 2009 with the release of Canabalt for iOS. Since then, runners of all shapes and sizes have been dashing out on pretty much every game platform, but the big hits in this genre have mostly lived on mobile. Scorcher from Radiangames is the latest contender in this arena, and—although it looks really slick—doesn’t quite have the oomph to make it feel particularly special.

It very much feels like we’re in the golden age of card-based dungeon-crawlers on mobile. Just last week, the fantastic Card Crusade dropped from Pollywog Games, and last year we saw the release of the completely free (and great) Mind Cards, plus the phenomenal Meteorfall, among others. With all of these quality releases, it seems impossible for there to be more room for games of this ilk to stand out, but then something like Pirate Outlaws can come along and prove that theory wrong. If it weren’t for two, very specific sticking points, Pirate Outlaws could very well be one of the all-time greats in the genre.

I love a good Metroidvania game, but there’s not too many to choose from on mobile. Dust: An Elysian Tail and Ninja Smasher are some of the few higher watermarks of the genre on the App Store, but aside from that, there isn’t much out there that passes muster. I was hoping that the release of JackQuest—a sort of retro-styled “one of those” from Crescent Moon Games—would add one more title into the pool of great mobile Metroidvanias, but its brevity and lack of creativity make it pretty unremarkable.

Card Crusade is a deck-building roguelite that reminds me of old-school iOS titles like 100 Rogues. It’s got a pretty basic exterior, but underneath the sparse and bland pixel-based aesthetic is a deep and engaging dungeon-crawler that’s hard to put down. The mix of old and new in Card Crusade makes it feel like your new favorite throwback.

Kingdom Rush Vengeance recently added more content to its already pretty packed tower defense game. This update, called Subaquatic Menace, promises more levels, heroes and towers for you to play with.

For fans of Kingdom Rush Vengeance, this is much welcome news, but this update might not exactly be all it’s cracked up to be. After playing through all of the content that Subaquatic Menace has to offer, I can confidently say it won’t sell you on the game if you haven’t already picked it up, and its additions will only make a big difference to diehard completionists.

Back in August, a little game called Radiant One came out. It was a solid adventure game with great visuals and a story that hit me harder than I was expecting. I wasn’t in love with it, but I enjoyed my time with it a great deal. So much so that I gave it a nice four star rating and recommended it to friends who were looking for something new to play.

It was around chapter 12 of Stay: Are You There? that I realized why the game wasn’t working for me. As a text-heavy, conversation-based game, Stay was delivering line after line of pretty unconvincing dialogue while providing me response choices that didn’t feel like anything close to what I—or anyone else—would say given the situation. This is but one of quite a few, large issues that loom over Stay, an obtuse, slow, and confusing adventure experience.

Wave Light Games has been working in its own lane for nearly four years now. Since their release of Demon’s Rise, the developer has been making turn-based strategy games that all feel cut from the same cloth, but not exactly in a bad way. Shieldwall Chronicles is the latest example of this. While this game promises to feature some sort of grand narrative, it mostly feels like the same loose-yet-satisfying tactics game that you’ve come to expect from Wave Light Games.